Hymns4Him

The Christian faith includes vast treasures of profound theological truths, from the deep mysteries of the incarnation to the incomprehensible dimensions of the relationships of the three persons of the Holy Trinity. And yet at its heart is a very simple message: that God has loved us and has given His only Son to die for us so that by faith in Him we might be saved.  We embrace the majestic Christology of Colossians 1:17-23 as well as the beautiful soteriology of John 3:16. It has been said that “the gospel is like a river, broad and deep; shallow enough for a child to wade in, but deep enough for an elephant to swim in.”  (Though often attributed to Augustine, the expression first appears in Gregory the Great’s commentary on Job.)

It is that simplicity which we find in many of the 19^th century gospel songs that became favorites in Sunday School, and have continued to be loved into our own day.  And it is a simplicity which does not sound condescendingly childish.  As adults, we love to sing and be reminded of the basics. Sometimes it may seem that preachers want to come up with some new slant on a Bible passage or theme.  But our hearts are thrilled by those foundational truths, even when they are expressed in words and phrases that we already know so well, and love to hear them over and over again.

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This current year of 2025 marks the 1700^th anniversary of the First Council of Nicaea (AD 325), called by Emperor Constantine to address the division brought about by the Arian controversy.  This council, one of the so-called Seven Ecumenical Councils (because they were recognized as valid by both the Eastern and Western branches of the church) met in the city of Nicaea in what is today northwestern Turkey near the modern city of Iznik, during the summer months of 325.  The earliest centuries of Christendom faced the double challenge of standing firm against persecution and standing just as firm against wrong doctrine.  Those years were especially difficult for the church as it needed to clarify a correct articulation of the Trinity, specifically about the relationship between Jesus’ humanity and deity, and then also about the relationships between the three persons of the Holy Trinity.

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In our Thanksgiving services over the years, one of the hymns we always sang was “We Gather Together to ask the Lord’s Blessing.”   In fact, to this day for some of us, singing it brings back pleasant memories of the church in which we grew up, and the yearly Thanksgiving Eve (or Thanksgiving Day) service.  On that occasion, we sang this hymn (and others with a similar theme) before the Pastor’s brief devotional message.  And then what followed was “open mike” time, as one after another stood where they were in the pews and described ways in which they were so thankful for what the Lord had done for them during the past year.

Thankfulness is a prominent theme in all of Scripture, especially in Psalms like 103, “Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me … and forget not all His benefits: who forgives all your iniquities, who heals all your diseases, who redeems your life from the pit, who crowns you with steadfast love and mercy, who satisfies you with good so that your youth is renewed like the eagle’s.”  How often do we need to be reminded of that when we look around at our present problems and challenges, forgetting how the Lord has proven Himself over and over again to be a good and faithful God?

This hymn is probably found in almost every hymnal, if not in the section of hymns for Thanksgiving, then perhaps in the section on Providence.  In these other topics, we sing of God’s mercy and grace to us, His kindness in ways that we do not deserve, not treating us as our sins deserve, but according to His sovereign love for us, His adopted children.  The theme is one that ought to be prominent in our prayers, remembering to thank the Lord for what He has promised and what He has already done, before we begin to list all the things that we yet desire from Him and for which we will always be dependent on Him.

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Endurance is one of the qualities that should mark the life of every Christian, but is one of the most difficult qualities to maintain, especially in challenging times.  Such is the case when believers come under attack for their faith, as we remember on the first Sunday in November each year, when the world observes the annual “International Day of Prayer for the Persecuted Church.”  Hopefully, everyone realizes that persecution is not just something that took place back in the early centuries of Christendom.

The ”classic” book about persecution was written by James Foxe following the terrible years of the reign of “Bloody Mary” (1553-1558) in England.  Almost 300 Protestants were put to death for their faith, refusing to accept her efforts to return England to Roman Catholicism.  These included not only clergy, but also lay people and even children, most of these burned alive at the stake. His 1563 publication, commonly known as “Foxe’s Book of Martyrs,” chronicled accounts of martyrdom from apostolic times until his day. In 1979, James and Marti Hefly wrote a book about persecution in the twentieth century (a second edition was released in 1995), “By Their Blood: Christian Martyrs of the Twentieth Century.”  In it, they show what most people don’t realize.  There were more Christians martyred for their faith in the twentieth century than in all the centuries of Christendom prior to that.

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Everyone knows that 1 Corinthians 13 is “the love chapter.”  It’s a favorite Scripture reading for wedding ceremonies, especially in the 17^th century language of the 1611 King James Version of the Bible, which called this love “charity” (which today suggests something entirely different!). But not everyone knows what that love is, where it comes from, or what it does.  It’s certainly not the romantic sentimentalism of “chick-flicks” or paperback novels.  No, what Paul was writing about is that quality of deep selfless devotion that motivates Christian relationships between one another and with the Lord.  It is modeled after the “agapé” kind of love that God demonstrates toward undeserving sinners like us in giving His Son for our justification, and giving Himself to us in our sanctification.  “Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and gave His Son to be the propitiation for our sins” (1 John 4:10).

The church at Corinth was sadly lacking in that kind of love.  In his first letter to them, Paul issued stern denunciations and warnings to them for their inconsistencies as believers and as a church.  There were the sins of divisions and quarreling, of incest, of lawsuits, of economic discrimination in the love feasts at the Lord’s Supper, of boastful pride in the exercise of spiritual gifts, and in all of this a lack of loving church discipline.  Paul was appalled (pardon the pun!) by this behavior and severely reprimanded them for it.  Apparently, a common theme was a lack of true Christian love within the congregation.  Paul addressed the matter of spiritual gifts in chapters 12 and 14.  In between came chapter 13, where the apostle wrote that the exercise of these gifts was to be motivated by this unique quality of love, itself one of the dimensions of the fruit of the Spirit.

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Why do you come to corporate worship on the Lord’s Day morning?  Many legitimate reasons could be offered, and we should be conscious of many of them as helpful, legitimate motivations that bring us together in the Lord’s House.  But among them must surely be the expectation and the desire that Jesus Himself would call us to Himself, would meet with us, would teach us from His Word and would make that Word effective in causing us to grow to maturity as sons and daughters of God.

Having ascended bodily into heaven, we do not expect the Lord to be physically present with us until He returns at the end of the age.  But He does meet with us spiritually through His Word. When it is read and preached, we hear Him speaking to us.  The Apostle Paul wrote in 1 Thessalonians 2:13,  ^“And we also thank God constantly for this, that when you received the word of God, which you heard from us, you accepted it not as the word of men but as what it really is, the word of God, which is at work in you believers.”

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In a worship service, we are coming into the presence of God.  As we learn from Psalm 139: 9-10 (“if I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there Your right hand shall lead me and Your right hand shall hold me”) and from Matthew 18:20  (“wherever two or three are gathered in My name, behold, I am there in the midst of them”), He is us with always, and we are never apart from Him, especially when we come into His house to worship Him.  And it’s what He promised in the Great Commission in Matthew 28:20 (“And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age”).

But there is something unique about the corporate gathering of God’s people on the Lord’s Day.  He delights to come and meet with us to receive our adoration and hear our prayers.  The realization that we will be in the presence of the King of the universe should make a powerful impact on us, causing us to think twice before we arrive, so that our hearts are prepared to meet with Him.  In addition, it should cause us to be richly energized and filled with a special excitement as the service begins. 

We typically call the initial prayer an invocation, calling upon the Lord to come and meet with us to bless us with His presence through His Word, as it is read and preached to us and as we pray and sing it to Him.  But in a sense, He is already there when we arrive.  It’s not so much that we are invoking His presence, because He is already present, having called us and then waiting for us to come at His invitation.  In our invocation, what we are more accurately doing is asking Him to energize our hearts and minds so that we can more fully and consciously enter into His presence.

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The four Gospels are the inspired record of the three years of Jesus’ public ministry.  They focus on the last week, with almost one third of the narrative dealing with the last week, from Palm Sunday to Easter.  But John’s Gospel is quite unique among the four.  It was probably written almost 60 years after the synoptics ((Matthew, Mark, and Luke).  It includes far fewer specific events in Jesus’ life, and far more of Jesus’ teaching.  In fact, while red letter Bibles are not a particularly good idea, if we were to look at one of those in the Gospel of John, we would find that almost half of the Gospel text is in red!

John’s Gospel gives us much more in the way of doctrinal explanation of Jesus’ person and work: who He is and what He did and why He did it.  John only includes seven of Jesus’ many miracles, calling them “signs.”  And He includes the seven “I AM” statements that Jesus made.  These have been the subject of numerous books explaining their significance, and have also lent themselves to sermon series.   Each of them connects Jesus with a huge spiritual need in our lives, showing how He is able to meet that need for those who have placed their trust in Him.

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By the Lord’s design and according to the Lord’s will, Christian churches regularly celebrate the Lord’s Supper.  In the 20^th century, it was common for church members to find this being offered only once each quarter, just four times a year.  By the 21^st century, it was not unusual to find the Lord’s Supper once a month, or sometimes even each week.  This has happened, not just because of a desire to imitate the practice of the early church with frequent observation of the Lord’s Supper.  More often, it came about as a result of the very real spiritual benefit it brings to believers (as the Lord intended), and therefore a desire to make that available to church members more often than just once every three or four months.  

However often a local church might observe the Lord’s Supper, hopefully many will recognize that the first Sunday in October is known as World Communion Sunday.  This was first observed in 1933 at Shadyside Presbyterian Church in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.  It was initiated there by Rev. Hugh Thomson Kerr to unite Christian churches through a shared celebration of Communion.  It was adopted by the Federal Council of Churches in 1940 and became a worldwide event.  Today it is observed by churches of most major denominations.  It provides an opportunity for believers around the globe to have a sense of oneness in Christ that stretches across many cultural, geographic, language, and even doctrinal barriers.

Whenever the sacrament is observed, all hymnals provide rich musical resources for people to be focused that day on what Jesus accomplished for us in His atoning death.  Some of those will be in the hymnal section on the Lord’s Supper.  Others will be found in the topical section on the suffering and death of Christ. Since this historical event is such a central matter in the Christian faith, these are hymns with which a congregation should be familiar and with which there should be an ongoing effort to increase familiarity with this repertoire.

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It would be a wonderful thing to begin and end each day in worship in our homes.  This was a pattern in the ancient monastic hours that included morning and evening set times, along with several other appointed times in the day.  The entire cycle of seven primary hours are Matins/Vigils (night), Lauds (dawn), Prime (sunrise), Terce (mid-morning), Sext (noon), None (mid-afternoon), and Vespers (sunset), followed by Compline (bedtime).  These hours form a cycle of praise and sanctification based on ancient traditions and were codified by the Italian Benedict of Nursia in the 6^th century.  We need not adopt that entire pattern (which also included rising in the middle of the night for a brief time of prayer!), but morning and evening are certainly do-able and beneficial for believers of all ages. For centuries, protestant churches have adopted a small part of that pattern on the Lord’s Day, with morning worship before noon, and then evening worship in the late afternoon, even often calling that a vesper service.

But there has also been something of that pattern in private homes. In its simplest form, it is evident in individuals (or couples) rising early for a time of quiet worship, sometimes called devotions. This was found in a time of Bible reading, prayer, and even singing at family breakfast, and a similar pattern as families gathered for their evening meal. Such practices have a rich and long-standing history, especially in evangelical and reformed households.  There are wonderful scriptures that encourage a practice of personal and family piety.  And there are hymns that also point specifically to morning and evening worship, whether at home or in church services.  Those of us who grew up in churches with a Sunday evening service remember hymns like “Day Is Dying in the West,” “Abide with Me, Fast Falls the Eventide,” “Now the Day Is Over,” “The Day Thou Gavest, Lord, Is Ended,” and “Softly Now the Light of Day.”

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